Communications with decode-and-forward relays in mesh networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes decode-and-forward relay mesh networks, deriving error probabilities and comparing their performance to multihop networks, showing significant improvements in various scenarios.

Contribution

It provides recursive error probability expressions and compares mesh networks with multihop networks, highlighting performance gains.

Findings

Mesh networks outperform multihop networks in error rates.

Complete and statistical channel information scenarios are analyzed.

Numerous simulations confirm performance improvements.

Abstract

We consider mesh networks composed of groups of relaying nodes which operate in decode-and-forward mode, where each node from a group relays information to all the nodes in the next group. We study these networks in two setups, one where the nodes have complete channel state information from the nodes that transmit to them, and another when they only have the statistics of the channel. We derive recursive expressions for the probabilities of errors of the nodes and present several implementations of detectors used in these networks. We compare the mesh networks with multihop networks, the latter being formed by a set of parallel sections of multiple relaying nodes. We demonstrate with numerous simulations that there are significant improvements in performance of mesh over multihop networks in various scenarios.